[Episcopal News Service, Diocese of Southern Virginia] The Rt. Rev. Frank
Harris Vest, Jr., eighth bishop of Southern Virginia, died on April 5 in
Lynchburg, Virginia. He was 72.

Vest was bishop coadjutor of Southern Virginia from 1989 to 1991, and bishop
diocesan until 1998. In retirement he served as interim rector of St.
Barnabas and Trinity Episcopal churches, interim chaplain at Virginia
Episcopal School, and interim rector at St. John' s Church, all in
Lynchburg.

Vest was known for "his abiding commitment to social justice combined with
his radical hospitality to those whose opinions differed from his own,"
according to the Rev. Michael Radford Sullivan, now rector of St. John's.

[Episcopal News Service] Juan Williams, an Emmy Award-winning American
writer and radio and television correspondent, will deliver the keynote
address at the 40th annual conference and meeting of the Union of Black
Episcopalians (UBE).

Williams, an Episcopalian, is a senior correspondent at National Public
Radio (NPR) who has written for The Washington Post and regularly appears on
Fox News and PBS.

"We are ecstatic that Juan Williams has confirmed to give our keynote
address this year at the 40th-anniversary conference," said the Rev. Martini
Shaw, conference dean and rector of historic St. Thomas African Episcopal
Church in Philadelphia.

[Episcopal News Service] After 27 years of leadership, the Rev. William S.
Wade, one of the longest-tenured heads of an Episcopal school, will retire
in June from St. Andrew's-Sewanee School (SAS) in Sewanee, Tennessee.

"I am retiring now because it's the right time for both me and the school,"
said Wade, who prior to joining SAS, served as chaplain of the National
Cathedral School in Washington, D.C.

Wade took on leadership of the newly combined school of Sewanee Academy
(formerly Sewanee Military Academy) and St. Andrew's School, in 1981.

[Religion News Service] If "art is the language of the soul," as Robert
Redford said at the Sundance Film Festival this year, I look at the "souls"
of most of the Academy Award nominees for best picture and see dead people.

Since the 1960s, film has increasingly been the place where we do our
theological work as a society. In film we ask the big questions: Who is God?
Who are we? What is our biggest problem? How do we resolve it?

In a nation where the dominant religion is Christianity, one would expect an
adequate Christian response to the theological questions raised by today's
films.

So what, then, are the theologies of the five nominees for the best picture
award, and is there a compelling Christian response?

"Religion in American Politics: A Short History" from Princeton University
Press, by Frank Lambert, 294 pages, hardcover, c. 2008, $24.95

[Source: Princeton University Press] The delegates to the 1787
Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a
national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American
politics. From the election of 1800, when Federalist clergymen charged that
deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today,
when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to
compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always
been part of American politics. In Religion in American Politics, Frank
Lambert tells the fascinating story of the uneasy relations between religion
and politics from the founding to the 21st century.

Lambert examines how antebellum Protestant unity was challenged by
sectionalism as both North and South invoked religious justification; how
Andrew Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" competed with the anti-capitalist
"Social Gospel" during postwar industrialization; how the civil rights
movement was perhaps the most effective religious intervention in politics
in American history; and how the alliance between the Republican Party and
the Religious Right has, in many ways, realized the founders' fears of
religious-political electoral coalitions. In these and other cases, Lambert
shows that religion became sectarian and partisan whenever it entered the
political fray, and that religious agendas have always mixed with
nonreligious ones.

Religion in American Politics brings rare historical perspective and insight
to a subject that was just as important -- and controversial -- in 1776 as
it is today.